Spring Has Sprung!

This is a little late in posting, but better late than never, I guess. Actually the title of this post might be wrong because we sort of skipped over spring and went from 20-degree weather to 80-degree weather in the blink of an eye! (For my friends reading this in Europe, that would be about -7 degrees to about 27 degrees.)

Anyhoo, the Hubs and I decided to get our gardening underway, since last year things were a little messed up with the upcoming birth of Gabe and subsequent hospitalization for a very looonnngggg month on my part.

The date was set for Easter weekend. DH was such a sweetheart and tilled the garden and planted the seeds and plants all by himself! Zeke and I did the herb garden as seen in this picture. It only took 3 days for little spikes of green to show up in the window box, and now, almost 2 weeks later, I have dill already reaching about 3" in height! My chives and basil are coming along nicely, too, but my rosemary hasn't done a lot as of yet. I'll have to trim that one constantly, as the package says it can grow as tall as 6 feet!

This year, our vegetable garden consists of: cherry tomatoes, Better Boy tomatoes, green and red bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, banana peppers (I think), runner green beans (half white), pole beans, eggplant (aubergine), zucchini (courgette), straight-neck yellow summer squash, carrots, and soon will also include okra, thanks to seeds from a co-worker of mine. We'd thought about asparagus, but there's way more work involved with that, and it takes a couple of years until you can harvest anything. I'd thought about including spinach and broccoli, two of Zeke's favorites (yeah I know, he's weird, right?), but that might have been too much for the space we had assigned. I'd even thought about cabbage for my chow-chow canning later in the summer, but again, too much stuff in too little space. If things go well this year, we may expand next year.

I'll post pictures of the garden in various stages of growth. As of right now, the beans and squash/zucchini are about 2" tall, and there is a mass of green spikes where the carrots are starting to come up. The tomatoes and peppers we bought as plants from the store, but everything else is from seed. I get such a kick out of knowing the vegetables we harvest came from seeds we planted ourselves.

And that's one more thing for me to blog about later...my canning adventures! Last year, I made chow-chow, hot and sweet pepper jelly, and cantaloupe jelly. We didn't make any of our squash bread-and-butter pickles because we still had some left over from the previous year, but we might do that again this year. They make great gifts, and people like this stuff!

I guess I can put my Ball canning book to good use this year. *grin* More on that to follow.

Wow, it's getting late. I'd better get to bed...just as soon as I go through my FB games real quick. LOL Goodnight, all!